The ChrysaLIST

I can't stop looking at this image. After a lengthy search, it's the one I finally selected to represent the close of the first Chrysalis Year. I'm just thrilled with it. It's so perfectly demonstrative. Except, as I was living it it seemed a whole lot messier. This photo makes the evolution process appear so clear cut and defined. But what's a true evolution without a little oozing from pod to gluey pod, thinking you've broken free from one, only to find you've gotta spend yet more time incubating in the same oppressive embrace you were positive you'd outgrown? I'm still trying to identify which of the five stages I'm at. I'm pretty sure I'm no longer opaque and green, but neither am I touching the tips of razor-thin wings to my four walls, plotting an escape. In time, right?

I've just re-read my launch post where I promised to chronicle the good, bad and ugly bits of my massive overhaul while peppering it all with a little cultural commentary and a few witty asides. What sort of amazes me is that while I was on board for a year of change, I had no idea which massive icebergs would actually shift and how quickly the river would rush in as soon as I'd made enough space. Some things are forever altered, some remain agonizingly unchanged, but this is for certain, one Chrysalis Year after my initial post I'm still walking upright...in a country I've never visited.

In honor of end-of-year list cliches, I will raise my glass of chompers and offer mine, a simple ChrysaLIST of hard-earned truths at the end of this year of change. After all, I love champagne...and I am not above cliches. Not at all.

1.) It's just a simple truth that finding a New York apartment will nearly kill you. And when you find a good one, you won't leave it until a.) you're married, b.) a baby runs you out or c.) all of your pictures have left 8' x 10', permanent smoky indentations on the wall you painted gray...or peach...or sage...

2.) It's just a simple truth that every piece of journalism and commentary you see, hear or read will tell you that getting student loans will now be much harder the year you decide to go back to school. The same will be true the year you finally decide to buy a house or car.

3.) It's just a simple truth that the word "change" is as powerful as the force of high tide. It draws you in, thrusts you forward and scatters you in pieces at the shore. It's hard to remember when you're caught in the undertow that that's the point. Even the tender utterance is considered action. The only condition? You gotta take change on its terms, not on yours. Yeah, that's a hard one to swallow.

4.) It's just a simple truth that leaving the country is the only antidote to our poisoned, sleepy urban blood. This funky Vermont mom I met in Honduras told me over Cuba Libres that travel "rights" her. God, I love that. A good trip is like burning sage inside our heads, restoring us to factory condition.

5.) It's just a simple truth that drinking apple vodka sangria, wearing a furry hat and Russian military jacket in a "subzero" drinking room while dancing to all manner of gypsy stars will make it so that you no longer feel "in your thirties". It's a moral imperative that this is done every few months while wearing that de rigeur Pepto pink lipstick that makes you feel really self conscious.

And perhaps the greatest Chrysalis truth of all? No matter how profound the feat, sacred the moment, or solid the win, the devil's advocate, flip friend and self-involved boss will just never get you. Hey, enigmatic is good--you don't have to share. So, my new answer to the disinterest of the oppressive, frivolous masses? In the words of my immortal beloved, Gogol Bordello, "Well, fuck them! We don't give up."

The fact is, I believe in the power of reinvention. The Chrysalis Year began as a tiny aspiration I was almost too afraid to nurture and unfolded into a story about letting go so that I had room to receive. Nah, I'm still not out of my job and I'm definintely out of my skinny jeans but hey, if I'd done it all in one year this would be a goodbye post.

Thanks for taking the walk with me. If you stick around for more I promise I won't stay the same for long. Please keep me posted on your own Chrysalis experiments. Rest assured, I'll be right there with ya.

Now, let's go finish that champagne.
Happy New Year,
OneKate

Next Year All Our Troubles Will Be Miles Away

So, this is Christmas.

If I hear it again I will move to Yemen. They can't possibly be playing it there. And yet, it is. It is Christmas. We've known it since the day after Thanksgiving. The relentless holiday carol battering ram beating on my mental door has weakened me. This morning I was rattled into consciousness by a rousing, world-music version of "Oh Chanukah" blaring from my indie music station. I'm slip-sliding through the streets on sheets of broken ice, bags in hand, wet mittens straining over raw knuckles.

So, this is Christmas.

I keep thinking of Christmas the year my mother left my father. I flew home for the holiday as I'd always done. The day after I arrived my father drove into the Colorado mountains to cut down a Christmas tree and dragged it through our front door to hoist it into its old metal stand by the fireplace. It was a handsome, fragrant piney beast--a blank canvas awaiting our traditional adornments. But nobody felt like making the effort. So instead of pulling out the endless strands of nearly antique colored glass bulbs and handpainted pine cones from the fourth grade, we just let the boxes of ornaments sit under the tree like gifts of apathy to our Christmas greenery. And so it went for days, a week even, the stoic empty tree a symbol of our family's sudden blankness. Finally on Christmas Eve my sister and I, drunk on too much mulled wine from the neighbor's gift basket, decided it was time to break the tree's silence. We opened a single box of ornaments and hung them without precision from its front branches, finishing with a flourish of the bright glass bulbs we'd had since childhood. The final result was uneven and full of holes, which was exactly how we felt that year. But in the dark with the lights plugged in it looked as though each glistening star and miniature sleigh was a single shiny band-aid over a hollow place and I suppose in a way, that's what they were for us too.

So, this is Christmas.

I can't stop eating the shortbread cookies that one of our vendors sent to the office. A five pound tin of the same exact cookie, row after row, stacked on top of eachother. This is the worst year yet for office gifts. I was praying for the chocolate-covered almonds from our air conditioning repair people. But they didn't show this year. Nor did the hand-dipped yogurt-covered pretzels with the Christmas colored dots and sprinkles from our packaging manufacturer. They must be pissed about the lip gloss bottle recall we did earlier in the year. Oh, the office gift. Such a pithy traditional effort at aknowledging that we're all tied up in the same "sucker" boat together. At least we got the PLINKO-esque jelly bean dispenser. A turn of the knob releases a single pink bean that bobs to and fro through a variety of little mazes until finally, it reaches your hand. That oughta keep me busy for the entire month of January.

So, this is Christmas.

I'm thinking of raiding my 401k so I can quit my job. I just can't see how the coming two weeks off will make it in any way easier to face another year of this continued identity stripping when I return on January 5th. I wanted to do this last year when my 401k had way more money in it but no, I waited for a more ideal time. Right smack in the middle of a global financial crisis? Yeah, I'd say that's pretty much ideal.

So...this...is...Christmas. Well, I will say this: I'm starting to relish the notion that my Christmas tradition is to pretty much have a different tradition every year. My non-linear Christmas heritage is evidence of the fact that life never ceases to surprise and amaze, even as it sometimes crushes. This year I'm going to look at my own Christmas tree with nothing short of astonishment. We got one up, felt like decorating and even slid a few beautifully wrapped boxes under it. The effort is its own little miracle. Here's to not doing the same thing next year, or the year after that, or the year after that.

Screened-In

It's official: I'm depressed. I spent all day on my loveseat in the dark yesterday trying to confirm this suspicion. And even though the episode of Top Twenty Five Unsolved Crimes I watched couldn't have helped matters, it's true, I'm under a bona fide cloud.

We screened Off the Radar for an audience two nights ago. It brought phase one of this project to a close. Phase two will be harder in a way because we have to figure out just what the hell we're gonna do with it. But now I've landed in a weird sort of limbo. I know I have to take a few weeks off to come down from the freefall of the last year. My brain has gone dull and mealy like cold oatmeal. I'm useless. I can't multi-task or self-motivate or any other hyphenated word combo. I've forgotten how to have a decent meal at home. Instead I'm piling up points at local restaurants while my beautiful new black stove sits untouched except for cat paw prints. And my closet smells like smoke--a telltale sign of too many late nights standing outside too many bars trying to shake off the days.

I have to wonder how long I'll last before I start itching to tick my way back up the roller coaster and descend down into another rush of late nights and limit-testing days. The fact is, I'm addicted to the mayhem of my double life. I have been for over a decade. And when I'm in these "interim" periods, this in-between, I don't know how to be me. I've built an identity around overextending myself. Who am I if all I have to do for awhile is make dinner at home?

And yet I don't feel ready to enter phase two and read the audience response forms we handed out. They're sitting in an envelope next to our hard drive, a hundred potentially heart and mind changing sentences peering through the seal. So, I've decided to let them sit for a week (or maybe more) until I can regain my footing. I can't stop thinking of what it looked like to see Honduras up there on the screen, in some ways just as I remembered it and in some ways even sharper and more alive. I want so much to feel that moment and let it sink in before I leave the audience and go back behind the scenes again.

I both need and don't know how to use this time off. The screening was a blur of names and faces, handshakes, shrugs, cringes and comrades. There's no way I could have prepared for how it'd feel to be there and no way to prepare for how it'd feel to be past it. So here I am, December 10th no longer looming and a crater of uncertainty lodged at the base of my spine.

I think Sam Shephard said that right smack in the middle of contradiction is where you want to be--that's where the action is. I think I'm there. Maybe that means something good is gonna happen.

Aging Disgracefully

Many of you know that I've just marked another year's passing. I bid it farewell from a Bulgarian bar and watched it ooze down into the horizon like a melting sun, all gooey and shiny and eventually gone, leaving only a slight blaze behind. It's a good thing I was nice and lubed up on Astika beer and apple vodka sangria because I didn't feel any sting. But that was a couple of days prior to my actual natal day when I was still in the early part of my particular decade, lightheartedly referencing When Harry Met Sally dialogue:

Sally: ...And I'm gonna be forty.
Harry: When?
Sally: Someday.
Harry: In eight years.
Sally: But it's there. It's just sitting there, like this big dead end. And it's not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was 73.
Harry: Yeah, but he was too old to pick them up.

I never thought I'd be such a disgraceful ager. I had a good model. My mother is so well adjusted about her age. She's let her hair go entirely gray, colored it, then let it seep back in, strand by strand, with great sophistication. And my grandmother faced her eighties like a Viking warrior wearing a steel breatstplate and studded armbands. She was a beast, grabbing age by the proverbial turkey neck and sending any "visible signs" of it whimpering to the sidelines to lick their wounds.

But here I am, a year older now. And why does it feel so catastrophic? I've always celebrated surviving another harried twelve months, feeling grateful to have more years in which to make an effort at thriving, "finding my bliss", knowing what I want to be when I grow up. But this birthday felt different somehow. I couldn't get out of bed. It hit me like a windstorm, blowing in hard and swallowing me up. Suddenly I couldn't breathe thinking about another year dissolved into the distance. I suppose it's a glass empty thing. I see aging as loss of years instead of gaining perspective, years in the can instead of years ahead.

Now, naturally I know that this is an issue loaded with conflict and symbolism. And I feel of two minds about it. On the one hand, why the hell should I accept the war of time on my face, body and spirit? Why wouldn't I do anything I could to defend myself against its attacks? On the other hand, why shouldn't I ease into my earned wisdom and battle scars and stop defining myself by yet another specific aspect of who I am? I'm certainly not the number I see on a scale or the number of zeros (or lack thereof) in my bank account or even the number of years I've worked at my job. Why then would I be simply...gasp...I can't hear myself say it...thirty....t...oh, fuck it.

There are some things I'm just not gonna accept. Or rather, some things I'm not gonna accept without railing about the injustice. Adult acne, aching knees, cynicism (okay, I already had that), and thinning eyelid skin (it's a concern, okay?). I do not accept these things. I know, I know, it doesn't make them go away. The eighties being twenty, almost thirty years ago? I do not accept that. But marriage, death, birth, loss, change? I can work with those. I'll take those marks of the passing of time as the acceptable part of aging. Not gonna stop me from considering Botox. Not gonna stop me from coloring my hair. Not gonna stop me from donning my own version of the Viking breastplate so I can snatch up more minutes and carry them off in my chariot.

In the end (no pun intended) I hope I can be a gladiator. I hope I can juggle the demands of age with a little bit of the pizzaz my grandmother had. She always told me aging is not for pussies. God, please don't let me be a pussy.

Please Mr. Postman

On Thursday, news of my future career as a student arrived in the telltale plain, white envelope.

I held its contents in my heart as I walked down the hallway toward our building's mail table. The rigid corner was sticking out from under a pile of coupon circulars and I could just make out "The New" in partial view on the return address label. Before I even pulled it out from under the stack of junk mail I felt the burn of tears in my throat. I brought it into the apartment and slid it gently onto the butcher block in my kitchen where it sat next to my vitamins and spatulas for close to an hour before I opened it. The ceremony felt so necessary. It was as though every word inside that mailer had the power to baptize me in a bottomless sea and thrust me forward, scrubbed clean.

I used a butter knife to slice through the fold in the envelope and, slowly, the stack of papers clipped tightly between my thumb and forefinger, I pulled them into the light. My eyes scanned for the one word I'd promised myself would be there if it were an answer in the affirmative: "pleased." They'd be pleased, I'd be pleased, we'd all be pleased. But it wasn't there. Black type on a white page, saying nothing. Then further in, deep into line five, simply, the word "pleasure." I'd so planned to see "pleased" that it almost didn't register at first. But of course! Of course it's their pleasure. Modern language, naturally. "It is our pleasure to welcome you." And there it was. A simple "yes" to so many feared "no"s.

I wanted to share this news with you first. Walking down the spiral staircase of uncertanties on this blog is how I have come to some very concrete truths about what it really means to change. So thank you for plumbing the depths with me. I promise plenty more risk and rationalization ahead.

We can start with financial aid.

SWAK,

OneKate

Stress Management

Our CFO has three CDs which he likes to alternate bi-weekly and which have become a form of mid-level office torture that feels pretty extreme these days. It's one thing to not like your job. It's another thing entirely to not like it, find out that it's possibly going to become obsolete at the hands of the same machete-wielding employment Grim Reaper who's cutting his way through all Manhattan office buildings and then be thrown into a weird sort of needing it/hating it/questioning why you even care about something that has given you acne, a drinking problem and anger issues in the first place conflict--all accompanied by the easy melodies of a.) Barbra Streisand in concert b.) Lionel Richie or c.) Genesis' Greatest Hits. The things is, he doesn't even switch them out. He'll just play one, all day long, over and over, for weeks at a time. Working across from him feels like being trapped in a retirement community's elevator with a ringing phone and a coffee maker.

As my personal hero Ellen Griswald would say, "under the circumstances", I have chosen to manage my stress in the following ways:

1.) By eating two bags of spicy Asian cracker mix, which is guaranteed to produce at least three canker sores before I'm outta here at 5:00.
2.) By using a paperclip to pick away at my perfect manicure, freshly painted yesterday with OPI Moscow Nights, a dusky, chocolate shimmer that, when chipped, makes my fingertips look as though I've dug them into someone's skin and begun to rip past the muscle. Freudian desire, perhaps.
3.) By reading the lengthy and pretentious accounts of visits to my dream Punta Cana resort on tripadvisor.com. Travel research is my weapon. The minute I see "10:00 a.m. conference call" in my email inbox, I go right to Google Maps and pick a destination. It's faster than morphine--a mantra that slips right into my veins and up to my brain: 'you are not trapped.'
4.) By trying on and wiping off every lip gloss in my desk drawer and then analyzing the color in my little gold antique mirror. Frost makes me look old. Pink makes me look cheap. It's decided, then. I pretty much can't wear lip gloss.

What I'm coming to realize is there's a sort of freedom in the intolerable. The absurdity of functioning too far beyond your limits feels like breathing inside a snakeskin right before it falls to the ground. But the unbearable itch of shedding a life that's too small does eventually give way to a brand new skin. Keeping this truth in my pocket as things begin to unravel is money in the bank. And yes, I think things are gonna have to unravel and possibly even break into a million little shards at my feet before I can build myself a bigger glass palace. But it's gonna be okay. If I get a slick new snakeskin me outta the deal, then I'm in.

Happenings

I thought today would be a good day to post some updates since I left you all hanging after my last post, wondering if I'd secure myself a proper rack and become an eastern medicine convert.

Alas, I have (and I did). I'm now taking all manner of herbal detox tinctures and monitoring the activity of my spleen. See, evidently (and according to my acupuncturist, who is fantastic) I have "Spleen Qi Deficiency". Apparently this is a malady quite common among New Yorkers. I've now had three sessions with this brilliant practioner and in that time I have to honestly say, I've begun to feel a bit buzzed. I would assume this energized, fluid feeling of buoyancy is Qi, which is finally becoming unblocked. So far I've had needles in my jaw, neck, the space between my first and second toe, my wrist and up and down my calves. What amazes me most is that everything is diagnosed by simply looking at my tongue and feeling my pulse. Then somehow this wicked maze of pointy sharp objects winding its way along my acupressure points drains out pain, anxiety and toxicity, all the while stimulating my muscles and stoking this internal Qi engine . It's bizarre and I'm totally willing to submit to it. I feel oddly centered and calm-- a feeling so foreign to me it almost seems like a new disease.

I'm still waiting to hear from school. I realize it's ridiculous to get anxious (which I am). Three weeks is not long at all. I just feel like everything hinges on this one possible turn of events. I need to make some major changes if I get accepted and I'd like as much time to totally upend myself as is possible. When I'm bored I like to keep busy by angsting over whether or not my essays were pedestrian.

On the fluffier side, I did in fact get the professional bra fitting. I won't go into lurid detail but suffice to say that perhaps the biggest lesson of this year is that making changes, however minor, creates emotional momentum and emotional momentum creates external progress. Even if it's progress in the form of something frilly. The whole femme fatale experience of the fitting started me thinking about overhauling my autumnal image. It's definitely gonna involve something purple and patent leather. Perhaps this is the year I'll finally try to pull off that sleek and age-defying Blade Runner look. On second thought, that would have to involve bangs. Back to square one.

The Off the Radar pilot is nearing its New York City debut. We plan to fully honor it with bells, whistles and wine. Every time I watch the footage I thank Honduras. I can't remember a time when I heard my own voice more clearly than on its silky shores.

So, all in all, more balls in the air, more balls in general and absolutely nothing certain except uncertainty. Time for another dandelion tea.
Cheers.

Celebrate Good Times

Well, at least I'm really good at waiting.

It's official. I applied for school. The notion that came to me in a dream as I slept in an island bungalow in Honduras now sits in an envelope on the desk of an admissions counselor at The New School--a mass of GPAs, demographic information, essay responses and course plans. Me, in matte, flat black and white, hoping to leap off the page into appealing relief. Truth be told, I'm so deep into this "living the life you wanna have" kick that I'm not even allowing for a plan b. It took me too damn long to figure out plan a. It's gotta work. I have no idea how long it'll be until I hear something. At least I've got Facebook to keep me company.

My mom told me once that if I can't learn to celebrate small victories, I'll never learn to celebrate the really huge ones. I can't believe how many things she's right about. This particular one, though, is so dead on. The morning that I walked into that school, transcripts in hand, and stepped onto the elevator with the leggings- and-scarves set was so...anticlimactic. I'd imagined the moment of handing my paperwork to the young woman behind the desk in Admissions and racing out to throw my hat in the air millions of times. 'I'll buy myself a fancy five dollar latte immediately after', I thought. 'I'll mark the milestone with that cement-colored nail polish I've wanted since May.' 'The treasured bottle of Moet I've been saving will finally be uncorked and I'll drink it straight outta the bottle.'

What I actually did was spend twenty minutes on the MTA and grab a shitty cup of Maxwell House at the office. God forbid I really have something to celebrate. I might just get excited enough to make a bowl of tuna salad and watch a rerun of Matlock.

So with this little lesson in mind and thinking ahead now, I'm gonna have two mini celebrations this week. That way when there's something really big to leap for joy over (i.e., getting IN) I won't have to ask how high. I'm gonna do two things I've always wanted to do that I hope will be like the milestone submitting my application was. One, I'm finally gonna get acupuncture. The list of reasons is too long to list here and anyway, who really wants to talk about indigestion and difficulty sleeping? I'm hoping it'll be a centering experience and that I'll get hooked and wanna go back. Two, I'm gonna get a professional bra fitting. Oh yes I did say that in this blog. I've always wanted to do it--actually see what they look like molded and sculpted by professionals into two shining orbs of glory. So, I've made an appointment at a little Upper East Side boutique to surrender my rack to a woman with a measuring tape and a handful of possibilities.

Bring on the celebrating, big, small, poked and perky.

Start Living the Life You Want To Have

Most of you know I'm completely at the feet of the impeccable
Mad Men. Every week I take away some juicy bit of writing to gnaw on and savor as I while away the day at an office that shares an address with its fictional counterpart but only dreams of its edgy, smoky productivity.

And then there are the gals. Oh, those are my kinda broads. Kept, some of them, burdened by gender politics, all of them, but each desperate to define herself and fighting like hell with perfect, red oval fingernails to scratch through the surface of Brill Cream, bourbon and boy's clubs.

A couple of episodes ago, one of my Mad babes, Bobbi Barrett, wife of an obnoxious, of-the-time comedian who'd been carrying on with with the leading man (Creative Director at the ad agency where her husband was under contract), had a scene that will stay with me forever. She'd been in a drunken car accident with aforementioned lead and was in pretty bad shape. She couldn't go home with a black eye and explain how it'd happened, so to her rescue came Peggy, the homely young copywriter from the office. Peggy put Bobbi up in her modest Brooklyn apartment for a few days while she healed. Naturally, as storylines like this go, the women had a few things to learn from each other. Peggy's discretion was foreign to Bobbi, who lounged for days and smoked cigarettes on her couch in a lacy black slip. But to Peggy, Bobbi was what she seemed to me: sultry, fragile, calculating and absolutely magnetic. At the end of her stay, as Bobbi patched up her face so she could go home and slide comfortably back into her role as domestic femme fatale, she told Peggy that you decide who you're going to be and that to get where you want to end up you just simply "start living the life you want to have".

I don't know why, but that line got inside me. And it was still banging around in my mind days later when I had a martini with a friend (going for style points) and we talked about how much has changed in the last year. I've moved, decided that I'm applying to school, finished the pilot. But I still can't cut myself loose from this job. It's my last anchor to the life I'm so ready to move on from.

So, what would happen if I just started living the life I wanted to have? My friend suggested that I urge things along by cleaning out my desk at the office. Hey, okay. Since I'll be leaving soon anyway, right? Why not start packing up? See what happens. I actually gave my email address to our IT guy the other day and said "hey, don't think I'll be around long. Here's this for when I'm gone. We'll grab a drink." I'm living the life I want to have. I plan to submit my application to The New School this weekend. I have no idea how I'll pay for school, or how I could continue working this job and be in classes. Oh well, I can't worry about all that now. I'm busy living the life I want to have. Right?

I'm gonna try on Bobbi Barrett's lace slip for awhile and see how it suits me. I've already tried the other method--living the life I don't want to have--and that hasn't worked for years. So, let's just see how this goes. I'm taking my desk plant home tonight.

Running WOman

Before I left for the desert, I had a formal running shoe fitting. I'd never done anything like that before, preferring instead to fit myself in a corner at DSW, hidden behind the bargain shoe rack and the fall boots display. I'd always be wearing my coat, sweating, carrying a purse or a Stop & Shop sack, walking no more than five or ten steps in the prospective pair to test them and then heading to the counter to drop some ungodly sum and get the hell outta there.

Now, I have to admit I've been off the sweat sauce for some time. My daily runs slowed at the beginning of the summer when we moved and slagged off completely when life became a daily grind of unpacking boxes, editing the show, crawling to the dreadful office and finally burying myself in all manner of frozen alcoholic concoctions to dull the noise. And through it all, I was desperate for an outlet, a hiding place, the old familiar knowing that comes from pushing myself really hard and getting past it. But as has been my pattern since conception, instead of balling up my anxiety and letting it explode somewhere outside of my body, I sent it further inward where it could get good and filthy and wash over me like a swollen, dirty river. That was the summer: me as still life. Necessary, yes, in order for other things to be in motion. But the pavement's been calling me back and besides that, my my jeans don't fucking fit right.

I felt totally sheepish going into a formal sporting goods store to buy running shoes. I've never seen running as a sport. For me, it's more primitive than that. It's like I'm tapping into some inner Clan of the Cave Bear tribeswoman, as evidenced by my threadbare leggings and cotton t-shirt running costume. Maybe I don't see myself as an athlete when I'm out there. But I think that's starting to change. It's not just about surviving a run. I can be faster, more efficient, work harder if I give myself the right tools.

I walked around for fifteen minutes, trying to avoid the "sign up sheet". See, the deal was, you couldn't buy shoes at this store unless you were professionally fitted. No standing in a corner, juggling a Sephora bag on one arm and a mini backpack on another. It's serious shit. You go in, they put you on a treadmill, they film your stride and they fit you. And every one of them is a version of the super hot cross country running captain you kinda dug in high school--lithe, willowy, lean. It takes major nuts to get your Hefewizen-ridden ass on a treadmill and let some clipboard-abbed, natural beauty analyze your stride imperfections. It takes absolute cojones of titanium to let a similar lovely help you find the right sportsbra after wearing the same uni-tit ace bandage of a bra through every run for a year. But I did both. And I ended up with a steel trap for my rack and the most gorgeous pair of silver and chartreuse Sauconys I've ever seen in my life.

I put them on for the first time this morning. They were gleaming new, awaiting a name. Gogol Bordello blaring, I got my ass outta bed at 5:00 a.m., laced 'em up and started running. It was everything I remembered: too hard to think of anything else and exhilirating as hell. I've set a few small goals to start. No marathons, just some consistency. I sorta see myself as running toward the close of the first installment of the Chrysalis Year. I've got some serious miles to put in before I get there.

I'm kinda feeling "Flash" and "Gordon" for my shoes. I think it fits.

These are the Only Words That Have Ever Made Sense To Me On September 11th

Riding the Elevator Into the Sky

By Anne Sexton (1975)

As the fireman said:
Don't book a room over the fifth floor
in any hotel in New York.
They have ladders that will reach further
but no one will climb them.

As the New York Times said:
The elevator always seeks out
the floor of the fire
and automatically opens
and won't shut.

These are the warnings
that you must forget
if you're climbing out of yourself.
If you're going to smash into the sky.

Many times I've gone past
the fifth floor,
cranking upward,
but only once
have I gone all the way up.
Sixtieth floor:
small pants and swans bending
into their grave.
Floor two hundred:
mountains with the patience of a cat,
silence wearing its sneakers.
Floor five hundred:
messages and letters centuries old,
birds to drink,
a kitchen of clouds.
Floor six thousand:
the stars,
skeletons on fire,
their arms singing.
And a key,
a very large key,
that opens something-
some useful door-
somewhere-
up there.

Away Message

Greetings Chrysalis Crowd,
Here I sit, awaiting my beloved Hillary Clinton and her vote-for-him speech. It's late, I'm bleary-eyed, I've got backpacks and trekking poles in the corner, ready to get dusty in the desert on my back. I'm watching the "Sound on the Floor" meter on CNN's overburdened DNC coverage screen slide up and down with the rise and fall of the voices of this or that speaker. I'm gonna take Hillary and the pundits with me in my heart as I leave. Perhaps I'll finally be able to meditate on all that's at stake.

I'm headed to Eugene tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn, where I'll celebrate the wedding of a dear old friend to a lovely woman. After the festivities, I'm on my way to the desert to hike the Grand Canyon, North Rim to South Rim, with a group of my favorite people in the world.

The canyon is my sanctuary. It's a cleansing place--a place of tremendous desolation and hope, humility, silence and grace. I go there to be quieted and beat down. The effort is a battle with absolute nothingness and total abundance all at once. Mostly, the silence of the space between the canyon walls is bigger than the sound of New York and it's bigger than me.

We finished the Off the Radar rough cut this week. Over five months watching every detail of that one astounding adventure flash across my view in HD has me full up. I need to empty my mental hard drive, compress some emotional files, make more space. The night we wrapped, I drove home feeling a tidal wave of despair approaching, ridiculously in tears over Pink Floyd's Breathe. It's taken days to figure out that creating this show has been a beautiful and necessary distraction for me and that without it, my devil's mind gets busy conspiring against my reasonable self. Me in Honduras--me anywhere else, for that matter, is me, boundless. Editing the show has been like having dinner with another self three nights a week. Talk about inferiority complex.

So, with that, I'm gonna go dive into the red dust and merge all my selves into one. I'm gonna get filthy, get blistered and burned and get right again.

Onward and upward,
Onekate

This Chrysalis Week

This is going to be a frivolous blog post but this was a frivolous, shit week. Frivolous. Shit. Well, except for getting within one paragraph and a single sequence of the end of the Off the Radar script and rough cut, which is a milestone that puts other milestones to shame. But besides that, did I say frivolous shit?

In honor of a week that actually had me in a pathetic, cliche pile of 9 to 5-style tears at my keyboard on Thursday night, I hereby relenquish the following dribble:

1.) I want Kim Kardashian's ass. On mine. Like, as an ass-transplant kind of scenario. Where hers goes over mine and I no longer have mine.

2.) "I'm ready for my bikini but at the same time I don't really focus on those things." Thank you, Emmy Rossum. Only people who are ready for their bikinis have the fuckin' nerve to say that they don't really focus on those things.

3.) I've officially been a Facebook member for a week now. I'll admit that I joined to look up my high school best friend, whose typed letter to me on my 17th birthday telling me she could no longer be my friend because I'd gotten too "funky" wrecked my world for at least a year. Naturally, she wasn't listed because she's now a fancy corporate lawyer in London (information courtesy of Google) and doesn't bother with things like Facebook, I'm sure. But in just a short week I've started feeling like I'm a lowly Facebook "add"--a number in certain people's social tickers, helping them achieve some abstract total that indicates they've got a network as wide as the Sargasso Sea. I'm a hole in a social belt-notch, a face with a button attached. Never mind that I've got a profile listing all my little interests, that I'm a fan of dogs, I like travel and really love old art-rock. That navy blue "add" button next to my name is all they're after--like little social Pac Men and Women, eating up add buttons for breakfast. It's all about the "add", isn't it? It's just another type of consumption. It's fine. I'm glad I joined just to hear about the lives of two great women I used to know. But someone told me it's a slippery slope. She couldn't have been more right. I'm currently skiing down a few too many of those, so I'm gonna go easy.

4.) I dreamed that I was fired by Hunter S. Thompson, who screamed at me for not sorting things into the correct types of piles. "You know I don't use computers!", he seethed. I remember thinking in the dream that with the firing and all, the upkeep on these dramatic blonde highlights was gonna become a problem. Hunter S. Thompson. Firings. Translation: work. It all comes down to that. It's where I go during the day and apparently at night as well. Even in dreams.

If it weren't for the dream of seeing Off the Radar run straight through on a television screen and the idea of leaning over the edge of the railing at the North Rim lodge in the Grand Canyon in two weeks, I'd still be toiling away in that Hunter S. Thompson fantasy, dreaming of a gonzo boss' bullshit idiosyncrasies.

I can tell I'm prepping to go off the grid. I'm sorting through my mental wasteland and it's pretty much just fluff: a filthy marsh of asses, history, margaritas, and office space, all jumbled up together, accomplishing nothing. Time to go away and clean house.

Don't Call Us...

Alright, an update is long overdue.

I went in to be seen for the beauty job. They didn't go for me. And while it was exactly the type of brand I want (I think) to work for: upscale, modern, fresh -- it was also kind of high-intensity. It appeared to be staffed largely by a gaggle of fluttering under-25s and there was a distinct Hills-y vibe to the environment: everyone in high-end flip flops and those ubiquitous shirtdresses that I'm starting to loathe. Every time I'm in a scenario like that I just feel so...dated. Yes, I was wearing my standard-issue wrap dress but it was far more Van Heusen than Von Furstenburg and I knew it. My husband always tells me if I'm apologizing for myself on the inside, I'm apologizing on the outside. So, I basically walked in wearing a nametag that said "Hello, My Name is Sorry".

I think I presented well on paper but it was one of the most intrusive applications I've ever filled out. They wanted to know my monthly rent, the make, model and year of my car, whether I was in debt and if I had ever indulged in alcohol on the job (clearly they see the two as related). I was absolutely quaking when they sat me down next to the other funky flower applying for the job on a worn, artsy-looking velvet couch. Prior to going in, I'd carefully placed a single precious, pristine white Xanax in the coin purse of my wallet in case of a panic emergency. This is something I sometimes do to stem the anxiety tide as a sort of insurance plan. I pretty rarely actually take them because they're long-acting and that's a big 12 hour committment to feeling soft around the edges. But knowing it's nestled in there alongside my dimes and quarters is sometimes enough to get me through an episode of tight chest and racing thoughts.

As I filled in the date at the top of the application my hands started shaking. It occured to me that I hadn't filled out a job application in ten years. And it was down the slippery slope from there. I lost my grip on the pen, feeling unable to correctly spell the word "July". I was certain the girl next to me in the gold Roman sandals was way ahead on her essay question about her accomplishments and disappointments and that I'd be left behind, stuck in the mire of reasons for leaving past jobs and professional strengths and weaknesses. Then I remembered the perfect white disk in my wallet. Somehow, in the ferocity of the moment, it occured to me to take it. Right there on the burgundy velvet couch. Next to Roman sandals girl.

And then I came down for a landing. 'You can't take fucking drugs right here, in front of a prospective employer who just demanded on their job application that you list the prescription drugs you're taking!' 'You can't take drugs when you go in to be seen for a job, period, even if they don't ask you what drugs you're taking!', I silently screamed at myself.

Wow, the whole process got me in a tizzy. I spent a day wondering whether they didn't call me back because I don't have a bachelors degree from FIT or they didn't like my answer to the "do you think everyone is basically honest?" question (yes). And then I talked to my mom, who reminded me that I'm interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing me. Yeah! With that in mind, maybe I didn't like the absence of low-end sandals in their office so much.

.

Seriously, I'm 32. I'm not applying for a part-time summer job at Sam Goody. I'm looking for the right thing. And I'm getting this internal message that that "thing" is probably much different from what I think I can do and where I think I belong. The entire point of this year has been that everything I've thought was one way is badly in need of a monumental shift. It's time to be open to possibility. I'm so feeling that. Whatever direction this bird is flying, I'm hitching a ride.

I wanna know what's out there.

Take This Job

Well, here I am nearly a week after my last post. I'm blonder, for sure. I told a friend that I feel like Amy Winehouse in reverse. If there was rehab for bottled hair color addiction, I'd be there, smoking cigarettes, wearing cutoff jean shorts and a trucker hat. The desire to be blonde was a good instinct. I've ended up with Aniston stripes on a Von Teese base--my for-the-moment homage to Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. The cliche is no bullshit--I do feel like I'm having more fun.

I'm taking my retro stripes abroad for 10 days where I'll once again be hawking lipstick to the masses. I leave tonight and nothing's done. I can't seem to get motivated. I'm reading email newsletters, slamming coffee, trying to G-chat my tech-poor father. I never do this. Usually, my suitcase is sitting by the door a day ahead of time, neatly packed, plane outfit folded into tidy squares on top. It's currently in the closet, screaming at me to fill it full of proper on-air wear, shiny baubles and shoes, "pocketbooks" and all manner of scrubs and sprays which I'll use to fluff myself into a presence.

Fact is, my head is elsewhere.

On Friday, I started submitting my resume. When I opened it up to print I saw that I'd last revised it in February. It's been ready to float out of my computer and onto the desks of eager employers for five months. And the funny thing is, the decision to finally get out there and start looking was so unceremonious. It wasn't a final straw situation or the dream of a Mary Tyler Moore hat-in-air moment that sent me to the fax machine at Kinkos. It was just. Simply. Time. I sent two resumes on the first day. That effort alone was enough for me to justify two agave nectar margaritas and a Modelo's worth of celebration to myself later that night. Just the doing of it--the breaking through the fear that there's nothing out there, that the search will be fruitless, that I still don't know what I want and won't be able to project it...the fear that someone might call me and I might have to go in and tell them who I am and what I want and represent myself was so drink-worthy, so "hell yeah, power to the people"-ish, that I felt satisfied.

And then one of them called me last night.

It's super early stages. A pre-screen. A you-tell-us-who-you-are-and-we'll-tell-you-if-we're-even-remotely-into-that kind of meet and greet. But after I took the call a billion little futures exploded in my mind: the submitting of notice, my first week on the job, buying a professional wardrobe. I'm going to let myself go there because I think it's good. I haven't been able to for 7 years at my current job and I'm pretty sure that's why I've been there for 7 years. Gotta be able to see it if you're gonna be it.

So, who knows? If it's not this one, it'll be another one. But there's no use doing what I usually do: immediately trying to bring myself down to earth, telling myself not to get excited, minimizing it, making it seem small so that if it doesn't happen I won't be disappointed. That just doesn't work. And if nothing else, it sure doesn't save me any difficult feelings. I'd rather feel potential disappointment on the other end than miss out on the great feeling of possibility now.

So, fuck it. I'm gonna get excited. There's light at the end of the tunnel...somewhere.
And if nothing else, there's light on top of my head.

Ciao, OneKate

Lighten Up

I've just been in California. I don't get there nearly enough and every time I visit I wonder why I don't just go ahead and vacation there. Why do I always feel I have to go abroad instead of packing up a Dodge Neon from Hertz and heading down the coast to sample tangerine olive oil and ride a bicycle barefoot in some funky yet upscale beach town?

Sadly, this was a work trip and I was stationed in the positively standard Hilton in Oakland. I found myself taking breakfast at that absurd business travel hour of the morning along with all the casual businessmen wearing cotton golf shirts, forced to listen to them talk about Body for Life over grapefruit.

I had some time to kill in the afternoon so I walked to Wal-Mart in hopes of finding beer to take back to my room. All I found was Red Bull and some diet tea with creatine that made me super edgy during an episode of Locked Up Abroad that I watched later from my flowered bedspread. If I were a real business traveler I'd be an alcoholic.

After a few hours trapped in depressive Hilton anonymity, I decided it was time to head for San Francisco. I arrived just as the sun was melting over the tops of the palms. I felt the familiar feeling I always have in California--slightly starstruck, oohhing and aahhing inside over the way the sun reflects off a particular window or a piece of fruit sits high in a tree.

From the moment the taxi picked me up at the airport and I scoffed at the driver's suggestion that I wait for the Hilton shuttle, I felt my east coast cliches slicing through that quality Cali air like a million little X-Acto knives. Hurry, hurry, gotta get to my supremely lonely hotel room so I can sit and watch crime television in the dark. As I walked up and down the gorgeous San Francisco streets carrying my unnecessarily large platinum patent purse I suddenly felt so...sullen. There I was, wearing all black in the middle of a shimmering San Francisco street. No light reflecting off of me, that's for sure. Proof of the sullen suspicion came when I reached Fisherman's Wharf and a "tourist sheriff" tried to arrest me for not smiling.

Since I've been back in the gritty city I've had this urge to shake off the darkness. It was pretty shocking to go somewhere else and act as wound up as people always say New Yorkers are. I do love me some edgy urban intensity, I do. But lately I'm finding myself fantasizing about Cate Blanchett's hair in The Talented Mr. Ripley--California crystal blonde. What if I just lightened up a bit?

(P.S. I got that little raise I asked for. It was little. And way more than a little late. But it might pay for a bleach job)

And Then We Came To...

So, I'm reading this novel, Then We Came To the End, by Joshua Ferris. A friend lent it to me about a month ago and I took to it immediately. To say it's about office culture wouldn't really do it justice, but it does embrace the intricacies of the office microcosm and explores them in squirm-worthy, knowing, lurid detail, all the while hinting at some sort of ending of magnitude. I'm not there yet, but I'm indulging in its many nods to the way functioning in an environment of unmemorable carpet and pressboard shelving can feel like a sort of robbery. Its cover is adorned, edge to edge, in blank yellow Post-It notes--a perfect homage to the empty confinement of spending our days sharing strange space with stranger people, and the surprising blankness of outrage.

I was engrossed last Tuesday night, as usual, when the following passage flew off the page and stopped my heart:

"There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make any of us still full from lunch want to lie down and insist that all those who remained committed walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their power bars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of any runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort. But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work."

I read and re-read that chunk of text three times before closing the book and nodding off. As I slept it rattled around in my brain like a loose screw I could hear but couldn't locate--irritating, tinkling, eventually banging and demanding I notice it. It was still with me when I woke up. The bit about microwave popcorn (someone's always making that), the reference to runs in the carpet, the way Ferris reminds me how it's really the tiny details that become our undoing in an office rather than the major committments of sin by management against underling. In the end, it's never really the lack of recognition, the passing us over for a better position, the eternal underpaying and overworking. No, it's more the cumulative nothings, like the the fact that The Company didn't invite us to dinner with the huge client even though we scored her in the first place, the sudden end of summer Fridays, insistance that we not eat Chinese food in our offices because they don't like the way it smells, and interrupting our meetings to ask for their messages (of which there are none). It's those idiocies, minor in nature and major in number, that have combined in my work life to numb me nearly to death.

Wednesday morning after reading the above passage, I woke up. I sat in another meeting listening to another spiel about another "opportunity to be seized" and thought, 'I will no longer be someone's opportunity-seizer without real financial compensation for it.' There's just simply a limit to how much work I'll do for The Company for free. And we're way over capacity. Way, way over capacity. So in the afternoon, I walked into management's office and told them that we needed to re-examine my "compensation to contribution" ratio. I have no idea where I got that phrase, but I think the looming fear of falling asleep on a floor covered in microwave popcorn and carpet runs was beginning to unzip me. In response, The Company offered the requisite passive-aggressive reminder of what they've done for me, reminded me of how underpaid everyone in our office is (that's supposed to make it fine??) and ultimately said they'd do something.

The deal is this: I'm building myself a bridge over which to walk into a different life. This job has its term limit, and we're nearing it. It's the next big makeover on the Chrysalis plan and is perhaps the biggest steel anchor of all, weighting me to my old life. It's a place where I regularly allow myself to be undervalued, understimulated, unchallenged and undefined. I've got to insist, no, fucking demand that I save myself from suckling for safety on shreds of blue carpet.

I don't know what'll come of my request for better compensation. In the end, I think it's most important that I asked for it. That I knew to ask for it. I felt it the minute I left The Office--the deep sense that I'd set off a chain of events that couldn't be undone. I guess that was the point.

This Is Me

-"Your self-effacing charms are shot/

-Wake up now to what you are and what you're not/

-You can run, run, run/

-But you can't escape"

-- The Helio Sequence, You can Come to Me

I got dressed to these lyrics today in my empty bedroom. How appropriate. This whole experience of preparing to move has been like having one of those police highbeams shot straight into my center, forcing it to be exposed. I feel like my insides are a maze of closets. Every time I open one up and dust off the bag of postcards or box of shoes at the bottom, another door opens revealing more dust and denial. I've got a deeper closet than I thought--both in spirit and reality. But I'm emptying it slowly, learning a few things along the way and dammit, I can finally see the floor in there.

Cleaning out seven years' worth of me from the inside of our apartment has been one revelation after another. I've reaped the mini rewards of what I call "closet shopping"--browsing the racks in the back of your closet for items you haven't seen in years. In my case, I moved in in 2001 with items I hadn't seen since 1997. A single visit to the stacking cubes in the back of mine yielded the baddest-ass purse ever, featuring a comically huge zipper on the front, 2 pairs of jeans that actually fit, some strappy faux-snakeskin sandals, and a sexy granite colored Calivin Klein v-neck. I thought, 'whose clothes are these? She has really excellent taste. Score.' Lesson: I am in fact capable of picking out "timeless pieces". Nobody will know that purse is over a decade old.

On the very same closet-diving trip, however, I found another me lurking beneath the boxes of socks. Hiding in the racks was a girl who once went to high school in the suburbs and wasn't afraid to show it. I trashed the following: a pair of white overall shorts, a Gap cardigan from...wait...1994 (I know it's that old because I stumbled across a picture from my sister's junior high graduation in 1994 where I was wearing the hideous green button-up with a pair of plaid shorts), and a t-shirt displaying the following identifier: "bad attitude", in splashy type. Gone, all of it! I was ruthless, brutal. That entire section of my life is now at the bottom of a Staten Island landfill. Lesson: it's okay to let go--especially if "letting go" involves overalls of any kind.

Closet also being timeline, I spent awhile browsing the the mid-late '90s. Those were my moving-to-New-York years and they're really fun to revisit. I unearthed: one pair of steel blue vinyl platform heels from Halloween 1997 (relics from my Pamela Anderson costume), my three inch t-strap character shoes (the most elegant dance shoes ever made), and the real jackpot: a box of letters and postcards dated from the day I moved to New York, all through my two years in school and into life after. I took a couple of hours and re-read every one. Pulled from the wreckage were: my mother's written explanation for leaving my father, a greeting card from my grandmother for every single holiday (she was so good), letters of love and adoration of the kind you can only write when you're 20 and single, and postcards from my friends who all took show tours right after graduation through Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska. They saw the entire country while I was busy figuring out how to install my first air conditioner in the summer of '97. Lesson: People have made my New York life what it is.

I'm starting to feel emptied out, liberated. I've held on to many things way past their reasonable expiration dates. Some of them need to be burned on a big, 'ol ceremonial pyre (hello, leather pants), some need to be dusted off and reshaped so they can be part of my life again, and some things need to go with me into the next dot on the timeline. Moving is exactly like those lyrics: waking up to what you are and what you are not. I'm definitely not my suburban high school shorts but I might still be a little bit steel blue vinyl. Whatever I am, I'm emptying out so I can make room for more life.

Well We're Movin' On Up

...to a deluxe apartment on the gro-ow-0wnd floor. Mo-oo-vin' on u-up...I don't know any more of that song. But I can finally write my own lyrics. We've found our new home. In Astoria. At last. Phase one of The Chrysalis Year Extreme Makeover Home Edition is officially in effect. Details will follow but first, a few props:

Thanks to the cosmic apartment Gods--those heavenly, lawnmowing, benevolent beings responsible for the assignment of empty spaces to empty people. They finally put us in our place (literally and figuratively). Thanks to George, our celadon-Jag-driving broker, and his negotiation skills. Never before have I seen such an honest attempt at wheelin' and dealin' on behalf of owner and future hopeful tenants. For three days he believed our shtick, we believed his, and that was all anyone needed to know. He: honest purveyor of fine vacated apartments. Us: honest couple in search of an upgrade. He did his job. He broked. We did ours too. We signed our first lease in a decade. It's a milestone of milestones in so many ways. Thanks to our three-legged dog and her pink bandana for being the picture of low maintenance gentility so that the new owner would consider allowing her to prance around on newly refurbished hardwood floors. Thanks also to our current landlord for taking her foot off the insanity pedal for a day so we could plead our case about pro-rating June's rent. And now, to our friends and family: thank you for tolerating endless philosophizing on how much the rental market has changed (duh) in the last decade, being patient while we mused on notions of gentrification versus renovation and borough identity, and helping us (me) locate Prospect Heights on a map. If we hadn't been able to hold in our hearts the vision of breaking bread with you at a table that doesn't have screw-in legs, in a kitchen with a floor that actually touches the walls, I'm not sure we woulda survived signing that two-page, single-spaced lease.

I reserve my final thanks for 35-08 33rd Street. Thank you, beloved chicken shack, for being my first home in a house-shaped home in New York. Thank you for having the kitchen we called all our friends from at 3:30 a.m. the night we got engaged. Thank you for hosting our rehearsal dinner after-party, a crazy drunken holiday cookie exchange, and countless intimate Thanksgiving feasts. Thank you for having just enough space in your living room for a beautiful Christmas tree filled with hand painted wooden ornaments. Thank you for being a private house--a private forum for the noise of living. You were (are) the home I walked out of as a single woman and back into as a married woman. You were (are) my shelter during one of the most significant periods of my life.

Of all the changes I've pushed to introduce in MCY, it stands to reason that this needed to come first. A lovely conversation I had last weekend reminded me of something: outside is in. Inside is out. I talk a lot on this blog about changing the exterior to yield results on the interior. I don't think I ever could've realized how much of a metaphor our living space was becoming. The darkness of living on top of one another was starting to feel like every empty space inside of me was really just a small, dusty hall closet. I have these applications for school sitting in a bag on the living room floor. I haven't been able to touch them. It's because I've needed a clear, new, open space on the outside so that I can make that same space on the inside and actually create something.

It's funny sometimes when things finally shift. It seems like they happen all at once. To me it's a sign that needing to move was some sort of a block. Once it opened opportunities could finally push through. In the same week that we signed the lease, all my remaining transcripts came through so that I can formally apply for school, we started editing Off the Radar and I got my first freelance writing job.

So, I've officially sworn off Craigslist and its hotbed of apartment huting deception and am now knee-deep in modern furniture catalogs instead. I'm in the market for saffron-hued dining room chairs because orange is the color of gratitude.

Me? Me?

Omigosh, it's finally happened. I've been tagged for a Meme (the blogosphere's lengthy answer to the "truth" part of a truth or dare). I'm kinda psyched, actually. I love reading these on other blogs. They're sorta like those "getting to know you" emails where you're asked if you've ever been to Africa and if you prefer hugs or kisses and you roll your eyes but secretely love typing that your favorite food is Mexican. Thanks to the gamely Frantic Puppy I have the opportunity to honestly purge myself of the following wishes, pleasures and regrets. Feels good. Watch out, you're next.


I can't believe I have never...
Gotten on board with Obama. What's wrong with me? It seems such a good fit: the progressive values, eloquence, pro-green-women-gay platform, the saying-all-the-right-things schtick. The celebrity endorsements. The youth vote. The polish and shine. The magazine analyses. The hype. The opinions of so many people I respect. If I'd thought for one second in 2004 when I saw "the speech" that I'd be standing dry outside the big, ol' Obama swimming hole in 2008, I'da been shocked. But honestly, it's just not happening. He's not my guy. There, it's done. I've said it.


I wish I'd...when I had the chance...
This rates second only to wishing I'd gotten an academic education, which I really wish I'd done and I'm really gonna try to do. But that said, I wouldn't take back the education I did get and I'm not sorry I made the choices I made when I did. So, after that, I only wish I'd gone to visit the Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, West Africa when I was there in 2001. The group we traveled with had an opportunity to see firsthand how people at the camp were living after the civil war. Some folks went and some stayed behind. I stayed behind. I've regretted it for 7 years. I guess I was on overload. We were maybe a week or more into the trip and I'd reached maximum density. It was my first experience with the poverty of a developing nation and I was afraid of what I'd see and how I'd feel and I felt myself sort of going numb and no longer taking in the experience. So I didn't go. I missed an opportunity to see for myself the failures of the UN and the lives of people who were living in conditions beyond anything I could fathom. It would've given me an even greater perspective than I'd already been granted on that trip as well as a deeper connection to the people in the region, and I'm really, really sorry I missed it.


I've never felt so out of place as when I...
Last stood in a room full of actors at an audition about six years ago. Self-producing kept me nice and comfortable in the roles I cast myself in so on a lark I felt it was time to "get out there" and fire off an audition to keep the muscle exercised. The sides were on little slips of paper like the ones you write the name of your secret santa on and all the actors were standing around in a hallway prepping with these tiny strips in their hands. The breakdown called for "Freaks, pimps, glamour girls and Eurotrash". Now, don't ask me why but at the time I felt I could play Eurotrash. It must've been the "trash" that I connected to. And for some odd reason I wore silver satin pants. I guess I sorta felt they were Euro in a way. Flashy. I had some seriously contrasting blonde highlights at the time and I can still see myself walking up to the building in my disco pants, wearing a scarf (actorly!) and a pair of cheap pleather platforms ready to blow them away with my faux-Berlin persona. I knew immediately it wasn't my crowd. This was a room full of young, ingenue-y, waifish girls pulling off that wispy, tight-jeaned vulnerability with ease. And there I was, sparkling and cheap (but not Eurocheap) standing akwardly in plastic shoes. Insecure but not delicately vulnerable. I felt sorta like an Elvis impersonator in a performance of Swan Lake. I selected my sides (a poem about how my ass looked in jeans--another mistake) and tried to prep, at that point more as an exercise in pain tolerance than a genuine desire to play Eurotrash. When I went in to audition, I got about 2 lines in, uttered the word "orbs" in reference to my ass cheeks and from the dark came "thanks so much". I'm absolutely positive it was the pants.


My guilty pleasure is...
Oh, The Hills. I love it. It thrills with its urban Cali setting, jetting off to Crested Butte, drone-y boys and foolish control battles. I love its voiceovers and personal revelations. I love its megabitch and super-sweet, the flip flops, baby doll dresses, fashion internships and product endorsements. I love Heidi's fake tits storyline and her faux relationship with Spencer and Lauren's work trip to Paris. I love Audrina's ridiculous name. Audrina Patridge. Mostly I just love to put it on and listen to the monotonous voices of the young and lovely hash out the business of being beautiful and burdened with bad boyfriends. De-lish.


I hope...knows how grateful I am...
I think my husband knows how grateful I am that he's my cosmic twin. But he may not know how grateful I am that he's a hopeful person with great compassion. He might be unaware that I'm grateful he's profoundly dark and funny and imaginative. He probably has no idea how grateful I am that he eats my food, listens to Edie Brickell with me when I'm on a tear and calls me "ma'am" when I'm being naggy. What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man.


In my darkest hour I secretly blame...
God. Myself. We compete for first place. Though, I do thank God that I don't blame my parents anymore.


...changed my life forever...
In chronological order: The Michael Jackson Thriller concert, Prince, The Cure, Siouxsee Sioux, drugs, dropping out of high school, black hair dye, Morrissey, moving to New York, sleeping at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Africa, This Woman's Work, getting married, losing my grandparents, finding our perfect dog, Gogol Bordello.


Every time I think about...I still cringe...
The first time I went on air on QVC in the U.S. I'm cringing so hard I can barely type. This also gets second place for the "I've never felt so out of place as when I" paragraph. I was replacing a former platinum blonde Mrs. America who'd repped our brand for a fucking decade, I had a severe updo and looked like the mistress at an orphanage circa 1935, I was under pressure to save our company financially in this one four minute spot and I was presenting cosmetics in a home show. I came just after the "mini aquarium" and just before the "car wash in a bottle". We sold 137 of 7200 items in stock. When I came off air there was no one to greet me. It's a "coffee is for closers" kinda environment. You only get an escort out of the studio if you sell mega product. I walked myself off the set and was greeted by a curt and hurried PA who pulled my mic quipment off in silence. Cringe.

So, now I gotta tag and keep the honesty comin'. Whatagoodguy, you're SO it.
Yours, OneKate

Dear Brooklyn

The following is a long time coming and I know it. Before I move either out of Astoria or to Astoria...again, it's necessary. It's a love letter of sorts and also a formal acknowlegment that I'm a stupid-ass and need to eat a Thanksgiving dinner's full of words. So, with that:

Dear Brooklyn,
I'm full of shit. You are really are a great borough.

See, I've been passing judgments based on those kids who look like Carol Brady infiltrating my little Queens nabe for the last two years. The fact is, I'm intimidated by white belts, spray denim and vintage glasses. I can't find those things at Target and that makes me anxious. And, I dunno, I just feel like those kids aren't coming to Queens for our great spanakopita. They want our cheap(ish) apartments. Nothing wrong with that, but they're the ones who made their own borough too expensive in the first place.

Really, though, I think I'm just jealous that sweater cardigans don't suit me and I can't rock that easy, edgy urban style. And maybe I feel like our borough lacks the kind of identity I wish it had. But the truth is, I never really knew you. I only knew your slopes and expressways and that's just not enough to sum a borough up. Besides, every borough has a "haircut". Boy, do I know that. I live in Queens.

While shopping for apartments, we've also shopped for neighborhoods. We've tried on Bed-Stuy (too up-and-coming), Bay Ridge (lush and bustling), and our dreamy Greenpoint. Oh, Greenpoint. You're so us. Just edgy enough. We'll never stop dreaming about living in you, you sweet little artsy, northernmost 'hood. We've scoped Brooklyn College's antique-y campus (charming) and enjoyed a sunny brunch in Ft. Greene (we know, not a chance in hell). And everywhere we've been, we've indulged in the color of Brooklyn, its hospitable variety and sense of self.

Brooklyn, you're glorious, you absolute destination. I was wrong, I was wrong. You are a wonder of grit and gray and gutters, a loud and luxurious urban paradise. I've spent the last month frolicking in all of your offerings and you're...ahem...um...twelve years in...a find.

Mine is a tale of isolation. New York has a way of making one insular in the most un-insular place in the world. But the shackles have come off, Brooklyn. My New York territory has gotten a whole lot bigger. I can't wait to crawl further inside you and see what else I've been missing.

I'm at the foot of your magnificent bridge.
I humbly admit defeat.
SWAK,
OneKate

Reality, Chrysalis Style

Hiya Chrysalis Camp,
There comes a day in every chrysalis journey when one must examine the full breadth of the tasks at hand (as well as the relative progress) and make some sort of big generalization about just what is being achieved, exactly. In other words, I need a reality check.

I think today is an excellent day for this. I'm sorta losing my nut. I've got my cell phone no further than six inches from my right wrist as I type, awaiting a call--any call--from a broker--any broker--regarding an apartment--any apartment. I've got two separate email accounts open in addition to my Blogger screen in the event that any one of fifty landlords/brokers/building owners I've contacted in the last few hours should happen to take a five minute break from walking people through empty, painted-over, poorly-lit, slightly aging apartments to sit down at a computer and compose a return email. I jump every time I hear the "new mail" alert and race to the little yellow envelope with my mouse only to find it's yet another "keep this flame going" email from a woman I worked with five years ago.

I've got each and every communication from Federal Application For Student Aid sitting in my email box acknowleding receipt of my application for the $3.50 they'll likely qualify me for but can't tell me about until after I've been accepted at a school I haven't decided on yet. Better than that, I have the auto-response from New York state's Tuition Assistance Program, which tells me its contribution is based solely on FAFSA's. Right on.

On the subway escalator this morning I was thinking about what all of this year's hanging about, flailing, faltering, hoping, sucking it up, letting go, accepting, resisting and resolving has amounted to thus far. And I decided that the measure of movement, however resembling of an iceberg, is the answer you get when you ask yourself where you are in comparison with this time last year. Asking myself that question is like dropping a big hit of Xanax (or binge drinking at a bar crawl--but that's another post). It slows me way down.

Last year there was no chrysalis. It wasn't even a concept. There were no empty apartments, financial aid forms, dream schools or polished up resumes. There was only the desire to be different in spirit and form and me, frozen solid under a lake of complacency.

So, five months in, what's my big generalization? The truth about change is that it's all relative. Timelines are abstract. Nothing ever takes as long as I think it will. Nobody else's timeline is the same as mine. Phone calls get returned at will, opportunities come and go more frequently than I have time to notice, my urgency is not necessarily anyone else's, and life is just simply not linear. If absolutely nothing else, the chrysalis concept has given me that big reality check.

I'm trying to learn that getting insane over stupid shit isn't necessarily the mark of regression but rather, growing pains. Part of the expansion process. Waiting for broker phone calls is a weird sort of blessing. Because, I suppose, they mean something is happening.